Making Music With Jake Haws

For this episode, I'm joined by a special guest, acoustic guitarist Camille Nelson. We talked about how she got started making music and she shares some of the stories behind the songs on her new album, Lead Me Home.

When my wife and I first married, we started a tradition of recording Christmas songs every year. Sometimes it's just one song and other years, we've recorded as many as five. We've kept it up for 11 years now, totaling 24 songs. This year, we recorded "Little Drummer Boy." I sang lead vocals, played acoustic guitar, bass, mandolin, tamborine, and cajon. My wife, Melissa sang harmony vocals. Our three kids joined in and played cajon and sang backing vocals. It was a fun song to put together. I hope you enjoy it and have a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

In this episode, I highlight my favorite music of the year including songs from Dr. Dog, Dan Auerbach, Jeff Tweedy, Asgeir, Mac Demarco, LCD Soundsystem, Iron & Wine, Morning Teleportation, Spoon and Jason Isbell. Visit http://jakehaws.com/ep-59-favorite-music-of-2017-top-ten-albums/ for more info on this episode.

For this week's episode, I break apart a folky bluegrass tune of mine about a fictional kidnapping. Music influenced by Tapes 'n Tapes. Visit jakehaws.com for lyrics and free downloads.

For this episode, I remixed a track by Bleachers called "Don't Take The Money." Bleachers is the project of Jack Antonoff. He is also a member of the band Fun and has written songs for some pretty big names in pop music including Lorde, Taylor Swift, and Carly Rae Jepsen. His new album, "Gone Now" came out earlier this year. The remix I did was for a contest put on by indabamusic.com. I was given 13 isolated tracks from the original recordings. The rules were that I had to use at least part of the vocal tracks and I couldn't incorporate samples from other songs for copyright reasons. I began by trying to program a new beat using a drum machine application in Pro Tools but I wan't satisfied with anything I was coming up with. Typically most remixes are electronic but I decided it was better to play to my strengths and take it different direction by going with a folk rock sound. I ended up keeping the keyboard track and 4 vocals tracks I was given and adding 2 acoustic guitar tracks, 3 electric guitar tracks, b

Today in Utah, we are celebrating Pioneer Day, which marks the day when Brigham Young and Mormon pioneers first arrived in the Salt Lake Valley. To commemorate the occasion, I'm going to share with you a performance from when I was a part of the Men's Chorus at Brigham Young University. This performance took place April 2007 at the LDS General Conference, which is a meeting the church hosts twice a year. The live audience in the building would have been around 21,000 but it's estimated the worldwide audience watching on TV, streaming on the internet and listening on the radio would have been around 2 million so, this is by far the largest audience I've ever performed for. The name of this piece is "I Love the Lord." It shares the same music as the hymn, "Be Still My Soul." The music was originally written in 1899 by the Finish composer Jean Sibelious as the Finlandia Hymn and has been adapted for many uses including a national anthem and a school song. Our version was arranged by the BYU choral instructor, Ro

For this week's episode, I'm joined by a guest collaborator, film composer and good friend of mine, Micah Dahl Anderson. The topic we randomly drew was "Write a song about a movie that doesn't exist." What you'll hear next is our conversation while writing the song (with the boring parts edited out), the process of recording it, and the finished song at the end. For the recording, Micah sang lead vocals, played acoustic guitar and drums. I sang harmonies, played bass, organ, and electric guitars. I'm pretty happy with the results. I think it's a really epic sounding song and collaborating made it better than it would have been on it's own. Micah's website: micahdahl.com Download "The Door" on Bandcamp Become a sponsor of this podcast through Patreon.com

This one is an oldie written when I was around 15 years old. I was going for an R.E.M. feel and I think I achieved that with the guitar part, which mimics Peter Buck's picking style. The intro kind of has a spaghetti western vibe with the tambourine, shakers retro organ and overdrive guitar. The lyrics are about feeling like your life is passing by. Visit jakehaws.com for more.

Here's a brand new song I recently submitted to a contest put on by the podcast Song Exploder and a website called Splice. Basically, Splice is a subscription site which contains a large library of samples you can use for your songs. For this contest, I was given a collection of 50 samples and tasked with creating a song using at least 4 of them. If my song is selected, I'll win a one year subscription to Splice, a Song Exploder t-shirt, and have my song featured on both the Song Exploder and Splice websites. In the spirit of Song Exploder and the Making Music podcast, I thought it would be fun to break down the song a bit and talk about how it was made. I ended using 13 samples for this song but I'll just point out a few of them. Most of the song revolves around this bassy synth line which I think sounds really cool. Reminds me a little of a Moog synth. The beat I choose was the wrong tempo so I had to speed it up to match the bassy synth. I also added other samples like a piano line, strings, ambient sounds

For this week's episode, I was was digging through some of my old tapes and found this instrumental piano piece I wrote back when I was around 14. I believe it might even be the very first thing I ever wrote. I submitted this tape for a school contest called "reflections" and won for my age category. It's not the best quality recording but I think it still captures the mood nicely. I'd love to see it in a movie. I think it would make a great film score. Maybe one of these days, I'll get around to re-recording it on a nice piano with quality microphones but for now, here it is. Download "Turned Away" on Bandcamp

This week marks the 50th Episode for me of doing this podcast. I started it about a year and a half ago and It's been a lot of fun so I'm excited for the many more episodes to come. This week also happens to be the 50th Anniversary of the Beatles classic album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," which is regarded by many as one of the greatest albums of all time. To commemorate the occasion, I recorded a stripped down acoustic version of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds," which is one of my favorites from the album. Visit jakehaws.com for more podcast episodes and free music.

Today’s episode is a song from my “50 songs in 50 weeks” series. This is one of my first songs I ever wrote, written back when I was 14. It's about a time when I went to a school dance and the girl I went with pretty much ignored me the whole time so I was pretty bummed. They said, write what you know, don't they. Come I was I was 14. I tried to copy a little bit the style of Dave Matthews Band, particularly the song, "Jimi Thing." I decided to just keep the production sparse and just do an acoustic guitar and a single vocal. Honestly, I'm a little embarrass by this one because it's kind of corny song but I felt like sharing something the represented my early songwriting. Visit jakehaws.com for more details.

This week, I'm sharing a track called "Elephant In The Room" from my upcoming album, which should be out this fall. Most of the time when I write songs, I start off by playing something on the guitar or piano, then come up with some sort of melody on top of it, then add lyrics. This song is a little different, in that I had the melody in my head and come up with lyrics before I even picked up a guitar. Then, I kind of figured out what the chords were gonna be after the fact. I think because of this, the melody is a little stronger than some of my other songs. I always thought the phrase "elephant in the room" was sort of funny expression. The image I get in my head of an actual elephant is sort of cartoony like dumbo or something and I thought it made an interesting phrase for a song. I think most of us can relate to being in awkward situations where people sort of pretend things are normal when they aren't. I also liked the idea of using other phrases that have both a literal image and metaphorical meaning s

For this week's episode, I break apart a song from my “50 songs in 50 weeks” series. This one was written back in high school. I originally planned on playing it with my band at the time, Made in the Shade, but it didn't quite come together when we jammed on it. When I wrote it, I was heavily into the band Sunny Day Real Estate. They came out of Seattle in the 90s and are considered one of the godfathers of emo. They've been an influence to hundreds of artists, including myself. Here's a clip from their song, "Pillars" from the 1998 album, "How It Feels To Be Something On." So I wanted to try to capture the some mood as Pillars. I began this song with just the guitar riff. For the recording, I've doubled it up to it's two guitars playing the same part, just to help it sound a little fuller. Next, it needed a beat. I didn't have a drum set available so I opted to use drum machine loops from my computer. It almost gives it sort of an industrial quality, which I kinda liked so I went with it. The guitar part and

This week, I'm sharing some music and sounds from a film project I recently worked on. This was a collaboration with my friend, Archie Crisanto. You long term listeners may remember Archie's name from episode 37 when we collaborated on writing a song together and also from episode 20 when I shared some music I wrote for a play he directed called "The Woman in Black." This project was a short 11-minute film Archie directed called "The Tailypo." It's a suspense/horror film based on an old folk tale. Basically, a starving hunter shoots off the tale of a mythical beast and cooks it in a stew, only to have the beast return and demand it back. Archie and I came up with the music and sounds together. Most of it was even recorded while simultaneously watching the video in order to get the right timing and pacing. So first, the opening theme is played on acoustic guitar by Archie. It happens during a scene when the hunter first shoots the creature. The theme is follow by a boom sound which I played on a cajon and heav

Today’s episode is about the title track from one of my albums called Ocean recorded back in 2002.First, I'll started with the influence. At the time, I was into a Seattle indie band called Pedro The Lion. One of my favorite tracks of theirs was the first song off their 1998 album, "It's Hard To Find A Friend" and the song is called "Of Up And Coming Monarchs."So when I wrote my song, there are several elements from the Pedro The Lion song that I borrow. First, I liked the 6/8 time signature. Most pop/rock songs are 4/4 time, which means each measure is made up of 4 quarter notes. With 6/8 time, each measure is made up of 6 eighth notes, which gives it a sort of waltzy, drifty quality so I wanted my song to have similar quality. I also liked the way the chords progress. The notes added between the main chord changes gives it a better melodic flow than just playing the chords straight so I tried to incorporate that as well into my song. I also liked how the lyrics mention things like like the ocean floor and s

Since Easter was this last Sunday, I thought I would share something I dug up from my time as a missionary. This is a recording of my mission companion, Elder Brad Chaston, and myself singing "The Lord is My Shepard" recorded onto mini-disc. We were in Manhattan and this would have been sometime between January and April of 2004. This is one of my favorite hymns. We're not perfectly in tune with our performance but for me, it has the significance of documenting an important time in my life so I wanted to share. Download "The Lord is My Shepard" for free on Bandcamp. Become a sponsor of this podcast through Patreon.com

This week's song is called "Scarlet Letter," which was released by my band Declaration on our 2006 album, Panic Button. This was originally written during my senior year of high school for a class project. We were reading the book, "The Scarlet Letter," and tasked with doing something creative to depict certain aspects of the story. Most people made posters or collages but I decided to write a song and perform it for the class. This is one of the few times I've actually sat down and started writing a song with a topic in mind beforehand. To give you a little background about the story, it takes place in Puritan times. The main character, Hester Prynne, whose husband was presumed lost at sea, has committed adultery and forced to wear a scarlet colored "A" on her chest so that everyone in the town would know what she had done. As it turns out, the person she committed adultery with was the town's priest, Arthur Dimmesdale, who is put in a position where he feels forced to condemn her publicly but secretly is ra

Today I have a special guest: Oscar Olaya. He's a rapper from New York City who now lives in Utah. We discuss his own journey of making music and play some tracks from his new EP. We even jam together on a song. Download his album on iTunes or stream it on Spotify. Here's his video for "I'm OK" (you can see me in the background): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rH4NoNPVko Here's the song Oscar and I jammed on in this episode: https://jakehaws.bandcamp.com/track/you-my-girl-acoustic-version

Pitchfork.com does a feature on their website called "5-10-15-20" where an artist talks about what they were listening to and influenced by during different ages in their life starting with age 5, than age 10 and so on. I thought it would be fun to do it myself. For a playlist with all these songs, visit: http://jakehaws.com/ep-40-5-10-15-20-music-thats-inspired-me-over-the-years/